MOSCOW, October 14. /TASS/: The Kherson Region will be closed to inbound civilian traffic for seven days due to an uneasy situation in the region, the region’s acting governor, Vladimir Saldo, said on the Rossiya-24 round-the-clock television news channel on Wednesday.
"If hostilities break out, there will be an artillery cannonade. They will bomb the city. It is better to take people elsewhere, which we are doing right now. For this work to be more orderly, the entry of civilians into the territory of the Kherson region is suspended for seven days," he said.
Saldo added that "only those with a pass from the military commandant's office" will be able to enter the region.
"Mostly this concerns those who are engaged in life support services and providing supplies and public utilities personnel," he added.
Saldo also stressed that work was underway to increase the throughput of ferry services to speed up the process of evacuating civilians from the right bank of the Dnieper.
"Boats that can transport people are being commissioned. Since the morning, people have been gathering at the designated sites in the city: the river port in the first place. Today we will add a few more sites where evacuees can assemble," Saldo said.
Earlier, Saldo said that civilians from the right-bank part of the region would be evacuated to the left bank of the Dnieper in view of a threat of flooding that might occur, if the Ukrainian military hit the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power plant. He also noted that Ukraine "is building up huge forces in the Nikolayev and Krivoy Rog areas." He stressed that the decision to evacuate civilians was also due "the creation of large-scale defensive fortifications, so that any attack could be rolled back repulsed.".
